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Thursday, 8 October 2015

Tales told in voices - Kirsty Logan's A Portable Shelter

A Portable Shelter - a boat in Bei Hai Park, Beijing

I’ve been thinking (as I begin work in earnest on my PhD
thesis) about the relationship between ‘oral’ tales and short stories. This was
prompted by a claim I read by an academic that orality is influencing
contemporary short fiction. He wasn’t talking about the recent surge in reading
aloud events, rather hinting at the appearance of orality in text, but said no
more than that.

Ever since I’ve been thinking about voices and telling in
new short stories, so I was excited to read the blurb for Kirsty Logan’s new collection,
A Portable Shelter. The stories in
this beautifully bound book are framed by an external narrative of sorts: two women
take turns to speak to their unborn baby, each secretly telling tales in
defiance of their promise to one another that they would only tell truths to
their child.

What I found inside the book was not a series of stories
told in alternating voices, but rather a whole collection which addresses the
function of the tale, or story, in our lives. The two women tell stories that
they hope will teach their child about the world, but not in a direct, or
obvious way. The theme of story, and how much we need it as humans, is present
throughout.

It is most striking in a story called ‘Ex-‘. This story,
alongside others in the collection, is told in the first person, but not by one
of the mothers. Rather, a man tells us about a series of events in his life,
explicitly refusing to make sense of them by putting them into a recognisable
narrative: “I get it. Stories need sense. Connection, logic, motivation. ‘He
did this later because this happened to him earlier.’ But not here. I want to
say right now, up front, that this isn’t a nice and neat and psychologically
satisfying story. Because it’s not a story. It’s my life.”

Except that what he reveals is precisely a logical,
satisfying story – at least to the readers. We can’t help ourselves but make
sense of his later attitudes and actions by referring to the things that
happened in his childhood. We construct a satisfying story in spite of his instruction
not to. It is an explicit exercise in revealing our propensity to do this,
which throws the other stories in the collection into relief, as narratives
derived from a much more complicated, nuanced reality.

Not that the stories here are realist – there is a satisfying
helping in this book of the supernatural, drawing as it does on the fairy tale
realm which, although unreal, helps us to see situations clearly.

Orality in Logan’s collection does not appear in the guise I
had imagined, but there is plenty of it. Stories told in the first person
include ‘The Keep’, told by a collection of non-humans (I won’t say exactly what
they are for fear of spoiling it) as they plant increasingly sinister gifts for
a woman who has gone to live with her lover in a caravan parked up in a tree. Here
the narrators are knowing where the woman they tease is not, whereas in ‘The
Animals Went in Two by Two’ the reader understands what the protagonist refuses
to as he clutches memories his uncle, the single positive influence on his
somewhat pathetic life.

The human voice is perhaps at its most sinister in the story
‘The mother of Giants’. Here we watch a story repeated by the women of a
community suffering through starvation, each time one of their members gives
birth. “There was a woman who loved her baby,” they begin. The reader knows
what is coming (I won’t tell!), and watches in horror as the narrator eventually
finds herself being told that same story.

It’s intriguing to watch a tale-teller such as Logan address
what her work is up to in the act of displaying it, and doing so far more
gently than earlier fairy tale writers such as Robert Coover or Angela Carter.
Her stories are not all pretty, but they are told with good intentions by the
two mothers in A Portable Shelter – a
reminder that even nasty fairy tales can serve us well.

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About Me

I am a writer, mainly of short stories, and those often with a folkloric bent. Some of these I write as part of my PhD in Creative Writing, at the University of Chichester. I am associate editor at The Word Factory, where I co-run a short story club, and I also run my own critique group for short story writers in London. Before all of that, I studied Philosophy for a long time, with an emphasis on philosophy of mind and rationality. I live in London and have a 'real' job as well as writing, but happily I reside by a little patch of woods which is all I need to keep me sane.